Creature Feature is a survey of twenty years of Sean McCarthy’s work in drawing, painting, and comics, all featuring delicately drawn tragicomic monsters. The earliest works on display are small, intricate drawings in ink and graphite of demons and biomorphic abstractions, followed by a series of watercolors and later acrylic paintings of maladapted hybrid creatures. The most recent work fully embraces the narrative impulses latent from the beginning in drawings made for a serialized graphic novel called The Novice, which the artist writes, draws, and prints himself. McCarthy has always employed techniques associated with the graphic arts, such as black lines and dots applied with very fine technical pens and acrylic markers as a means of emulating etching marks, and watercolor or thin layers of acrylic applied in a way similar to reduction printmaking. McCarthy’s work is broadly allusive, engaging with literature, film, esoteric texts, and a wide range of art historical touchstones; it explores grotesque mysteries and uncomfortable psychological and emotional states in a language of expressive, exquisite draftsmanship.

This event is open to the general public.

Sponsored by the James W. Palmer III Gallery.